Will be offered to students first, enterprise offering likely to follow

Late last
year, Google put out a call to participants to sign up to
become beta testers of free notebooks that ran its fledgling Chrome OS (not to
be confused with the Chrome browser). With an expected mid-2011 launch, the
company said it was working out a few kinks.

Reports
now say Google is preparing to announce a game-changing price point tomorrow
regarding its Chrome notebooks.

According to Forbes, Google will
announce a $20-a-month package for students that includes both the hardware and
internet access, in what "is almost certainly a precursor to an enterprise
offering."

"Small
and medium-sized businesses are banging on our doors to get something like
this," the unnamed Google executive and source of the story said.

Google
currently offers businesses a Cloud-based suite of software similar to
Microsoft Office for $50 a year. Forbes posits that a laptop
could be added to the deal rather cheaply, in the same way that a cell phone
comes at a discount when tied to a calling plan.

And
students are the best guinea pigs in this case. Twenty dollars a month is less
than a data plan from any of the major carriers. Testing the product on
students also builds in demand as they graduate and join the workforce.

Another
aspect where the Cloud-based productivity suite appeals to business is control.
Employers can better control where its employees can go online and how they use
and access internal data.

The
Google executive said the company is very close to solving the problem of
working offline, in cases where there is temporarily no web access. That
appears to be the Chrome laptops' biggest hurdle.

Updated 5/11/2011

Google just announced that the ChromeBooks will be available to students for $20/month and to businesses at $28/month. The price will include enterprise-level support and "regular hardware refreshes". Google is a little fuzzy on specifics, but it mentions in a separate article that 3G models will come with 100MB of free internet access.

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I am guessing it will be a Celeron quality laptop worth no more than $250 (less to me).

The internet access is the interesting part. Will there be some 250 MB data cap for a plan like that? Whose towers will they be using? Need more details before I can say it is even worth $20 a month. If it does have a low cap then it is worthless to me and all college students.

How is 250mb a month Worthless? You do not represent the norm of the college community that would use this laptop. I would guess you would probably not be happy with the specs anyways. Doesn't play Crysis... This laptop would be used for typing, research, e-mail and maybe a few flash games. It also has WIFI so you don't have to use the data plan all the time.

It's a Cloudbook. Don't count on it, especially in future iterations. Plus, what if you needed to FINISH a paper. Regardless, I agree that Wifi should handle the majority of your needs, but the fact remains that you're renting a crappy "laptop" with a boxed CloudBrowserOS.

Bottom line: If MS was doing something like this, people would be criticizing the OS, the Office software, the hardware, the monthly rental plan, the data caps, everything. But if it's Google, it's cool and edgy. Of course if Apple did it, it would be the best thing ever. It can even run Apps! Can your Windows laptop run APPS!???

Also meant to add that if Google was really as open source-friendly as they pretend to be, the OS would be a Google Linux distro, and the Office software would be open source and offline-friendly, for all Linux users to enjoy. They could add access to Google's app store as an easy (and optional) means of getting software, for novices.

They want you in their walled garden just as much as anyone else, but their walls are made of transparent aluminum.

Of course it's not going to play games, but have you used a Celeron based computer vs anything else? It's almost like stepping up from dial-up to DSL. College students still need to use Office and other software never mind the more demanding software of some other majors. Flash games stretch the limit of a Celeron processor now... how will it cope 2 years from now when things are more demanding?

I doubt it will have a 250mb data cap, but if it did it would be unusable to any college student. We need more details about the data connection before anyone can say this thing is a deal.

I consumed more than 250MB/month on my dumbphone. That's without tethering and streaming. Only RSS and browsing mobile sites. So, for cloud based laptop 250MB is worthless. Move 10MB presentation to cloud back and forth few times and start paying extra.

Besides, "Twenty dollars a month is less than a data plan from any of the major carriers" is not exactly true - AT&T unlimited dumbphone data plan is $15.

I would assume it also has WiFi capability, and would resort to a 3G/4G network only when WiFi was not available. I have an unlimited smartphone data plan with Sprint (4G even), and I'm finding I typically use less than 100 MB/mo just because so many of the places I frequent have WiFi.

Google has lots of smart people. I'm sure they analyzed how much data typical students would move over WiFi and 3G/4G networks before deciding on the $20/mo price.

I'm just not sure how useful this thing will be without internet connection. Some Google apps will have offline mode, but everytning else - I just don't know.And for 3G models free data cap is 100MB/month

100 MB is beyond worthless. They might as well make it Wi-Fi only. Not sure why they are even bothering with the 3G part of the laptop. I guess they are looking for people to buy a higher plan.

That $20/month will quickly turn into $50+/month for just a couple of gigs of data per month. That will be enough for all college students, but the price will not be more than double the $20/month. Still need more details.

quote: You do not represent the norm of the college community that would use this laptop.

Clearly you don't either.. When did you go to school, 1987?

College students are some of the heaviest bandwidth users on the planet, so I'm not exactly sure what your point is. These are not simply heavy gamers, these are average people using the internet for much of their entertainment.

Now I would tend to believe that most users will have access to wireless, but you are kidding yourself if you think 250MB would be even close to enough for the average college student if this was their main source of access.